emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) (10/13/90)
Cross-posted to a few unlikely groups because I don't know the
sub-specialty that knows how to deal with this problem. Followups
to comp.ai.
In article <1990Oct12.105710.29940@chinet.chi.il.us> laird@chinet.chi.il.us (Laird J. Heal) writes:
What really needs to be done is to redirect inappropriate articles into
more appropriate newsgroups, as with the reposted articles comprising
comp.archives.
Not exactly. comp.archives does not view any article as
"inappropriate". Rather it culls out particularly appropriate
articles, dusts them off and cleans them up a bit, and places them
into a new additional group. Inappropriate articles are silently
ignored.
The problem with doing this is threefold. First, I would
not trust a program to automatically inspect an article for content and
place it in a newsgroup. Second, I would not trust any old Joe on the net
to put my article in any old newsgroup, and third, anyone or any group of
people who would be trustworthy to catalog the articles would burn out
within a very short period of time.
I wouldn't want to have software automatically take articles and
rebroadcast them around the net; that has too many opportunities for
feedback loops. A better solution would be to retroactively
cross-post the possibly interesting or appropriate articles into a new
local newsgroup, which you could then read locally and have a
tremendous competetive advantage over other people who are slogging
through junk.
I think it's possible to build an expert system (or whatever the
current word for those things is these days -- knowlege-based system?
natural language understander?) which finds things suitable for
comp.archives, and by extension any other group with a similar narrow
focus. At least I would hope so, after all I have a few thousand
articles which a human system has found, something should be trainable
to mimic what I have done.
--Ed
Edward Vielmetti, U of Michigan math dept <emv@math.lsa.umich.edu>
moderator, comp.archives
after 1 November 1990: <emv@ox.com>